May I Have Your Pantelegraph? The Ritual of Book Signing in a Digital Age

I congratulate you, my dear Cornelia,
on having acquired the valuable art of writing. How delightful to
be enabled by it to converse with an absent friend, as if
present!
—Thomas Jefferson

She hesitated, and then, impulsively,
“I wonder if it would be too much to ask you for your
autograph?”

Ralph then attached the Telautograph to
his Telephot while the girl did the same. When both instruments
were connected he signed his name and he saw his signature appear
simultaneously on the machine in Switzerland.—Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+ (1911)

I.

On February 27th, Toni Morrison took part in an online
“Hangout” hosted by Google Play, during which she video-chatted
with a few lucky fans from around the country before signing their
copies of Home. The cover of each person’s ebook was
personalized remotely (“For ______ / Toni Morrison”), and images of
the covers were posted to the Google Play page as well as
Morrison’s profile page. According to Publishers Weekly,
Morrison also signed paperback editions of the novel for Google
employees in New York, her physical location during the
Hangout.

Debate about the
pros and
cons of ebooks usually focuses on the relationship between a
text’s significance and its medium, passing over the trivial issue
of a signature’s significance. But signatures are actually an
instructive test case when it comes to the fetishization of books
as physical objects. Although many people would prefer to read a
digital version of Home, it’s a good bet Google’s most
ardent technophiles didn’t ask Morrison to sign their tablets
instead of their paperbacks.

Signatures possess an idiosyncratic significance that does not
translate well into bits and bytes. Even human interaction seems
easier to digitize, a strange paradox vividly illustrated by
Margaret Atwood’s 2006 invention of the LongPen. The LongPen
combines standard video-chat functionality with a robotic signing
station, purchasable, in theory, by any local bookstore. After
meeting an author online, fans place their books in the station.
Then, like a remote surgery system, the robot’s pen-wielding “hand”
is guided in real time by its absent operator, faithfully
reproducing virtual pen strokes in ink on a real page.

Atwood explains: “You don’t have to be in the same room as
someone to have a meaningful exchange. As I was whizzing around the
United States on yet another demented book tour […] I thought,
‘There must be a better way of doing this.’” She has now teamed up
with Fanado, a
company that distinguishes itself from other online signing
services like Authorgraph.com and Autography.com in part by
offering virtual fans a personalized “wet-ink” signature. But the
LongPen’s supposed advantage raises some interesting questions. If,
as Atwood claims, you don’t have to be in the same room with
someone to have a meaningful exchange, then why do you need ink for
a meaningful signature? And if ink really is required, are there
other requirements that the LongPen fails to meet?

II.

The ancestry of disembodied writing devices can be traced back
to the polygraph, a primitive copying machine patented in 1803 and
made famous by Thomas Jefferson, who helped improve the design and
had one installed for personal use at Monticello. Mounted on a flat
platform, the polygraph links a master pen to two slave pens using
a set of hinged wooden rods attached to a bridge or “gallows
frame.” An enthusiastic archivist of his own work, Jefferson prized
the polygraph for its ability to copy letters as he wrote them,
allowing him to send one letter and keep two others for his
records.

The polygraph was an extraordinary feat of engineering.
According to the Library of
Congress, “it is nearly impossible to determine which copy of
the page was made by the pen held by Jefferson.” Nevertheless, it’s
hard not to feel like the “original” letters are somehow enchanted
by their mode of production. This intangible difference is
reflected in the
rhetoric of auctioneers, who trumpet pages that come from the
master pen, as well as in Jefferson’s habit of honoring
correspondents with the original letters and archiving the
polygraphed copies. In a blow to the LongPen, it appears that those
who fetishize handwritten documents prefer them written by
traditional hands.

Sadly, Jefferson never lived
to see the LongPen’s true functional ancestor, the first machine
specifically employed for long-distance signing. Ingeniously
combining two of Jefferson’s favorite inventions, the pantelegraph was
developed by Italian abbot and physicist Giovanni Caselli in the
mid 19th century. Fascinated by the telegraph’s potential, Caselli
began work on a device that could transmit facsimiles of letters
and images. His efforts eventually attracted the attention of
Napoleon III, who financed the project and granted Caselli access
to the French telegraph system to conduct experiments. In 1860, the
pantelegraph successfully transmitted an image between Paris and
Amiens, a distance of 87 miles. The image chosen for the
demonstration? A signature, that of composer Gioacchino Rossini.
(The pantelegraph’s mechanics are incredibly complicated; think
giant fax machine with a pendulum that requires you to write on
special non-conducting paper before sending.)

Standard telegraph proved more efficient than the cumbersome
pantelegraph for information transfer, and Caselli’s invention was
used almost exclusively for verification in long-distance banking.
Only pantelegraphed documents could provide the legal authority
necessary for financial transactions, transmitting messages
“immediately from the hand of the writer” and “conveying a
facsimile of every word and syllable […] bearing the full
authenticity of the hand and signature, according to John Timbs, in
The Yearbook of Facts in Science in Art of 1862.

Notwithstanding the widespread adoption of the pantelegraph and
its successors, the telautograph and the fax machine, people remain
dubious about the ability of machines to (re)produce significant
signatures. Take the recent controversy surrounding Obama’s use of
the autopen, another popular remote signing device. Autopens are
highly customizable autonomous signing machines, capable of storing
a variety of signatures for use on everything from traditional
documents to sports memorabilia. They are routinely employed by
presidents: Truman signed his checks by autopen, and there is an
entire book written about JFK and his autopen called The Robot
that Helped to Make a President.

But when Obama signed the Patriot Act from France with his
autopen, a group of 21 House GOP members protested the
Constitutionality of the signature, citing Article 1, Section 7,
Clause 2: “Every Bill which shall have passed the House of
Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be
presented to the President of the United States; if he approve he
shall sign it…” Obama is not the autopen, argued the lawmakers,
ergo he exceeded his Constitutional authority by having a
“surrogate” sign the bill.

Fortunately, in 2005 the Justice Department’s Office of Legal
Counsel foresaw this problem and drafted an
opinion for the Bush White House that justified Obama’s action.
The opinion cites early common-law cases that locate the legal
significance of a signature exclusively in the consent of the
signatory: “if one of the officers of the forest put one seal to
the Rolls by assent of all the Verderers, Regarders, and other
Officers, it is as good as if every one had put his several
seal….”

This seems like a reasonable position to take on a signature’s
legal significance. But authors’ signatures have a different kind
of significance, one that isn’t located in mere consent. That’s why
Donald Rumsfeld couldn’t appeal to his legal counsel when it came
out in 2005 that he’d been using the autopen to sign condolence
letters for families of soldiers killed in action. It’s no surprise
that the families (and the media) found the autopen signatures
crucially lacking. A traditional signature requires time and
personal attention. It is a sign of sacrifice, an element
unnecessary for producing legal objects but essential for crafting
sacred ones. Rumsfeld’s signatures may have been authorized, but
they were utterly insignificant. (The same goes for Gregg Allman’s
autopenned signatures on his memoir.)

The criterion of sacrifice might explain why LongPen and autopen
signatures would be less significant than in-person signatures.
Both machines, after all, are testaments to the signatory’s
unwillingness to sacrifice time and effort. But according to the
same logic, Toni Morrison’s virtual signatures should be no less
significant than the paperback ones. She spent time producing them,
in addition to interacting extensively with their recipients, a
courtesy that probably wasn’t extended to the employees at Google’s
New York office. So why the preference for pen on paper?

Resale value can’t account for it—signed copies of Morrison’s
books can be had
for a measly thirty bucks. Nor is scarcity an answer—there are
far fewer of Morrison’s virtual signatures than her physical ones.
As for the notion that digital signatures can’t be authenticated,
well, the problem of authenticity is universal, affecting ink
signatures and digital ones alike. It isn’t hard to imagine
technology that could “tag” Morrison’s electronic signature, much
as an ink signature is tagged by certain identifying
characteristics. Digital forgery is a possibility, but that doesn’t
explain why an “authentic” digital signature should be worth less.
The fear that digital media are more perishable than paper was
thoroughly
discredited by David Bell in the New Republic, who
points out that librarians are furiously digitizing physical media
in the name of preservation. As any collector knows, paper books
can fade, decay, suffer water damage, burn up, become lost or
forgotten.

The mystery remains unresolved: for reasons independent of
authorial sacrifice, the market, scarcity, authenticity, or
perishability, physical signatures written by hand are more
significant than their digital analogues.

III.

In “Unready to Wear,” Kurt Vonnegut imagines a Kurzweilian
future in which humans are “amphibious”—capable of becoming
disembodied at will. Amphibiousness is a tremendous advantage: no
disease, no injuries, no politics, no toilets, no “old-style
reproduction,” near immortality. Amphibious Pioneers can “meet on
the head of a pin,” and they are “true to themselves, no trouble to
anyone, and not afraid of anything.” The friendly first-person
narrator assures us that any perceived drawbacks to disembodiment
aren’t real, “just old-fashioned thinking by people who can’t stop
worrying about things they used to worry about before they turned
amphibious.”

The only job left for amphibians involves maintaining storage
centers, where spare bodies are kept. Occasionally some people get
nostalgic for embodiment, and the bodies are there to accommodate
them. The centers provide a specialized service, tailored to the
aged; as Vonnegut’s narrator puts it, “the youngsters… don’t even
worry much about something happening to the storage centers, the
way us oldsters do.”

Almost as an aside, we learn that the bodies serve one other
purpose. Each year a group of amphibians occupies them for the
Pioneer’s Day Parade, held in honor of Doctor Konigswasser, the
discoverer of amphibiousness. At the head of the parade marches
Konigswasser’s body, a miserable thing that the doctor himself
refuses to reinhabit: “Ulcers, headaches, arthritis, fallen
arches—a nose like a pruning hook, piggy little eyes, and a
complexion like a used steamer trunk.”

Understandably, Konigswasser talks about humans like some ebook
purists talk about books: “The mind is the only thing about human
beings that’s worth anything. Why does it have to be tied to a bag
of skin, blood, hair, meat, bones, and tubes? No wonder people
can’t get anything done….” And yet, his emancipation of humanity
from the physical is commemorated by a ritual that itself requires
embodiment. It is as if the amphibians recognize that sacred
practices belong to the physical world, that humans are only
venerable in virtue of their dual nature as minds enfleshed,
inconvenient though it may be.

In their own small way, authorial signatures also commemorate
our nature, which informs our preference that they be physical and
produced without a complicated apparatus. When I look at Norton
Juster’s signature in my copy of The Phantom Tollbooth, when
I touch the ink of his inscription, I am told a powerful story:
Norton Juster wrote this, in the flesh. The story connects
me to another human, to the bag of skin and bones that spoke so
meaningfully to me when I was a little boy. This is the point of
signatures, of relics and special places great and small: their
attachment to narratives of physical encounters. Kurt Vonnegut
wrote on this typewriter. Thomas Jefferson sat right where you are
sitting. Thousands died in this room; see their scratches on the
walls. Such stories do not translate well into bits and bytes.
The ritual of book signing, like the Pioneers Day Parade, cannot be
disembodied without loss.

Here is the most profound difference between ebooks and paper
books. It’s not that paper books can be signed in ink—that’s a
trivial advantage. It’s that they serve so well as relics. When we
finish a life-changing book we return it to the shelf, or the
virtual shelf—I do not deny that powerful reading experiences can
occur with ebooks just as easily. But when I see the spine of a
physical book on my bookshelf, when I pick up that same companion
many years later, I am told a powerful story: You read this, in
the flesh. That is the only story I hear. A once-read paper
book has no other purpose than to be itself, and picking it up no
other purpose than to remind me of our time together. When you pick
up an ereader, on the other hand, more likely than not it is for
the sake of doing, not commemorating. Fifty years from now, my
paper relics will still be sitting on the shrine of my bookshelf,
but the only Kindle anyone will keep around is the one signed, in
metallic Sharpie,
by Jonathan Franzen.